Object-ives #43: A Raw Hunk of Amethyst

The purple hunk may not count as serious jewelry or bring good luck, but it’s still one of my treasures

Deven and I sat side by side, our silence broken only by an occasional squeak as I nervously shifted in the swivel chair. A chilly spring rain tapped at the windows, running down the glass and distorting the view of the Hudson shore. Opposite us, Steve, the divorce mediator, peered down at an open folder on the massive resin-coated slab of walnut that served as his desk. You could serve a formal dinner for six around that thing, eight if you didn’t mind crowding your guests.

Steve ran his finger down the list in front of him, nodding and grunting a soft uh-huh at each item. When he got to the end, he raised his head and looked at me. “What about the jewelry?”

His question threw me. “Jewelry? What about what jewelry?”

“The jewelry,” Steve repeated. “It’s not on the list. Who gets the jewelry?”

Deven and I were there to discuss equitably splitting up the stuff we owned in common. I had tallied everything I could think of with material, sentimental, or practical value, inventorying furniture, books, pictures, dishes, even the contents of the liquor cabinet. I had some jewelry, of course, but I also owned jeans and dresses and a bathrobe. It never occurred to me that anything I wore would be subject to the division of property in our separation agreement.

Realization dawned. Steve wasn’t asking about my strings of glass beads or hammered copper earrings from a craft fair. He meant big-ticket items, an expensive watch or a hefty engagement ring. But the few pieces I had that qualified as serious jewelry clung to the bottom couple of rungs of that ladder. Plus they were things I had inherited—my mother’s wedding band, her mother’s modest engagement ring, a moonstone pendant that had belonged to my other grandmother—not gifts from Deven.

When we decided to get married, I didn’t ask for and wasn’t given anything to flash off my left hand. For wedding rings, we had picked wire-thin gold bands. Simple, subtle, nothing valuable enough to quibble over. Nothing to split because we each had one. Months earlier, I had ruefully stashed mine in the very back of my jewelry box.

For a quick moment, though, the mediator’s question struck a suspicious, even paranoid, nerve in me. I felt like Steve knew that a pirate’s chest overflowing with glittering swag lay waiting to be unearthed in the back yard, probably camouflaged by the compost pile. Had Deven had been holding out on me all these years, hiding gems and gold and other treasures that might have been, should have been, mine?

Wait.

Mud and gems and rain. Deven had once given me gems.

It was the first morning of our brief honeymoon, a drizzly day, chilly and gray for late May. Still, we set out on foot from the inn where we had spent the night, ready to explore the little Minnesota river town. We strolled up and down the streets, wandering into antiques shops, ducking into a cafe to warm ourselves with coffee. Back outside, we turned a corner and came across two men selling raw clumps of amethyst—my birthstone!—out of the back of a battered green pickup. They had hammered them out of a rock formation somewhere nearby, they told us. The amethyst-studded rocks, ranging in size from tangerine to football, were nestled on a pile of muddy tarps next to a produce scale; the men priced their wares by the pound.

Together, Deven and I picked out an angular hunk of rock. It was the dirty gray of the damp sidewalk under our feet, but veined with purple. Amethyst crystals jutted out, their facets sparkling like fireworks frozen in a July sky. My brand-new husband opened his wallet, peeled off some bills, and bought it for me. More paperweight than jewelry, the gift felt like a fairy-tale treasure mined by elves rather than by two enterprising men in grimy jeans. On that day and for years afterward, I prized this serendipitous find as an omen, an amulet, a promising portent for our freshly minted marriage.

“So the jewelry,” Steve prompted again. “What about the jewelry?”

“Nothing really to speak of,” I told him. “Nothing that needs to be included on the list.”

My honeymoon souvenir didn’t make the cut as marital property that needed to be divvied up. Nor did it pan out as a good-luck charm for a long and happy life together, but that’s a lot to ask of inert mineral, even when it’s bedazzled with purple crystals. Still, I continue to cherish my amethyst. I like seeing it on the bookshelf near my desk. I like cupping its cool heft in my hand. I like the reminder that once upon a time, two hopeful people loved each other enough to sign on for a lifetime together. Mostly, though, I like that it reminds me that pockets of magic lurk in the world, waiting to manifest even at the most unlikely of times. When you crack open an ordinary-looking chunk of rock, for example, or turn a random corner on a drizzly, gray, Minnesota day.

Jill Rovitzky Black is an editor, writer, and inept but enthusiastic potter who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she struggles to keep weeds out of her garden and chaos out of her house. A lifelong wordsmith who most recently made her living by writing and editing medical education grants, scripts, and slide decks, she is currently working on a memoir about dealing with her husband’s behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, which remained undiagnosed until after his death.

Object-ives features flash nonfiction essays of 500-999 words on the possessions we can’t stop thinking about.

Recommended reading on possessions:

“It started with a pair of baby shoes…” by Deborah Way, The Keepthings

“Living in The Objecthood.” by Kim Foster, The Great Perhaps

“3 Keepers & a Regret: Laurel Cummings” by Rani Monson, Retail Therapy on Substack

“Confessions of an Obsessive Collector” by Java Ceridwen Bere, From Java with Love

“Why Am I Carrying Around 3,856 Photos of a Stranger?” by Charly Cox, Lovely Girl